ProAssign Wins Rep. Bigg’s (AZ-05) 2019 Congressional App Challenge
Rep. Andy Biggs has named a Gilbert student as the winner of the Congressional App Challenge in Arizona’s 5th district. Edward Wang, a homeschooled student, submitted ProAssign, an app that assigns problems for students based on what they got wrong on an assignment.
When asked why they are passionate about creating an educational assistance app the student replied, “I coach a math club with several other coaches, in order to get more teaching time in class, we decided to assign problems to students before the class that week. The past year, we assigned the problems in class, but that took so much time to do.” The student hopes to encourage other students to better their communities by using their computer science skills.
Over 10,000 students registered for the 2019 Congressional App Challenge. These students created and submitted 2,177 functioning apps, marking the end of the most successful Congressional App Challenge to date. All told, 304 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 48 states, Puerto Rico, the Mariana Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The CAC is an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. The non-profit Internet Education Foundation provides the CAC with supplemental staffing and support. In the five years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded 1134 App Challenges across 48 states. Thousands of functional apps have been created by over 25,000 students, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics